From research to resistance, UC graduate students find purpose in union organizing

REBECCA GROSS WILL NEVER FORGET standing in solidarity with fellow graduate student union workers during the United Auto Workers 4811 strike at UC Santa Cruz in spring 2024. 

What Gross remembers most is the moment her friend — a fellow UCSC student — was fired for allegedly violating a restraining order for picketing on campus.

Gross watched in awe as fellow union members rallied around her friend, a graduate student and union member. Fellow student union members held a rally in her honor. More than 1,000 people signed a petition. Eventually, the college relented and rehired Gross’ friend. 

“I know my union would fight like hell for me,” Gross said. 

EdSource spoke to a half dozen graduate student workers across the University of California system, including UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis and UC Berkeley, to find out why they chose to be part of the union, the challenges they face while advocating on behalf of their peers and what key issues they hope to tackle in the upcoming contract negotiations.

In most cases, college student union members said that they joined UAW 4811 to fight for issues important to them, from legal protections for international students to better pay to job security. Some students, like Gross, fought for causes they strongly believed in before they arrived on campus, such as immigrant rights and Palestinian liberation. Others want to fight for fairness and equality, but in a way that provides safety in numbers. Still, others gravitated to UAW 4811 without a plan or cause, but found something that enhanced their lives and collegiate experience.

While these student activists and advocates land at the same picket lines, at regular meetings and rallies, each finds a different way to balance academic life with union life, and each student walks away with a different experience.

Gross constantly travels between Northern and Southern California as the unit chair for the UC Santa Cruz branch. On top of this, she balances research as a Ph.D. candidate in literature and a teaching assistant position. Her job and union work amount to more than 60 hours per week, but she said it’s all worth it if it helps improve working conditions for herself and her peers. Gross is one of more than 48,000 student workers across the UC system represented by UAW 4811, hoping to create better working conditions for graduate student workers. 

The United Auto Workers started as a union for laborers manufacturing automotive parts, but has come to encompass thousands of local units representing non-manufacturing workers. With four main bargaining units, the UAW 4811 chapter represents graduate student researchers (GSRs), academic student employees (ASEs), postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers. Contracts for graduate student workers — specifically ASEs and GSRs — are set to expire at the end of the year. Members like Gross are working to renegotiate their contracts. 

Passion for justice and solidarity 

Ruby Kharod, a Ph.D. student in chemistry at UC Berkeley, easily puts in more than 50 hours per week doing lab research and union work. Kharod devotes about 20 hours per week to the union, including giving a speech at rallies about every other month. She also conducts lab research in the chemistry department for about 35 hours a week, developing new materials to remove carbon dioxide from the air to improve the climate. 

Kharod serves as the recording secretary for UAW 4811 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the UC Berkeley campus, and frequently travels between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, helping to negotiate contracts for her fellow graduate student workers.

Balancing all of these responsibilities is hard, but not impossible. Kharod’s research mainly takes place in a lab, and she often runs experiments and takes care of union duties at the same time. During some longer experiments, Kharod will leave the lab to speak at a rally or attend a union meeting.

But for Kharod, the balancing act is well worth it — being in the UAW is part of her calling to help others.

“It’s hard to motivate me to do [something] if I don’t believe it’s going to help people,” Kharod said. “That makes me very stubborn at times.”

During her undergrad at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Kharod was in a group called Pleasure, which aimed to combat sexual harassment and assault on campus by hosting educational workshops about safe sex and healthy relationships. At MIT, Kharod felt like whenever she spoke with campus administrators, they didn’t take her concerns seriously. But this lack of response energized her to continue her advocacy work post-grad.  

“Having a union and being able to be on equal footing with admin that don’t take you very seriously, that’s how we make change,” Kharod said. 

In addition to joining the UAW, Kharod is also a member of Normalization of Diversity and Equity (NODE) at the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry, which works toward increasing resources and accessibility for underrepresented chemists. 

Seeing how some of her co-workers are affected by immigration crackdowns, Kharod hopes to prioritize protections for immigrant student workers during contract negotiations. Earlier this year, one of Kharod’s classmates stopped taking public transit out of fear of being deported, and now uses a ride-sharing service to commute to campus daily. 

“[So many] UC Berkeley graduate students are international students, and you see your colleagues so scared to even leave the house,” Kharod said. “You can’t change where you’re from.” 

Protections for international students  

In their second year studying environmental policy and management, Dewansh Matharoo’s biggest goal in life is to create a world where everyone has access to food. Matharoo, who uses the pronoun they, volunteers with a mutual aid group called Davis Food Not Bombs, which prepares and serves free meals to community members in Central Park in downtown Davis twice a month. 

But Matharoo can’t fulfill their goal without first completing their master’s degree. Under the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies, it seems like anyone can have their student visa revoked at any time. 

Students across the country watched as international students had their student visas terminated mere months ago. Among them was Matharoo, an international student from India at UC Davis. Though they did not have their visa revoked, the possibility weighs on their mind. 

That’s why Matharoo joined the UAW 4811 Contract Action Team at UC Davis — being in solidarity with fellow graduate student workers helps them feel safer as an international student. 

“Being a member of our union [as an international student] is a protected right, and that’s one of the more secure ways I know of making sure that we’re protected,” said Matharoo, a teacher’s assistant for a class called Environmental Mitigation and Impacts. “That security in knowing that there are, just in the UC system, 48,000 workers who I know are behind us, is the reason that I’m organizing proactively.”

More than 13,000 graduate student workers signed the UAW 4811 immigration petition earlier this year, outlining five demands for protecting international students, including a financial and legal safety net for immigrant student workers, denying federal immigration agents access to university property without a judicial warrant, and publicly affirming and defending the right to academic freedom and free speech. 

The UAW is also advocating for year-round funding, which would provide job security and protect international student workers. Currently, graduate student workers are only guaranteed to receive payment for nine months out of the year — meaning that unless they can find a job for the other three months, they do not have work authorization or the money to stay in the country. With 12-month funding, international student workers would not have to exit and reenter the country every summer, thereby reducing their risks of deportation or detainment by U.S. immigration enforcement agencies. 

Researchers against war: Protesting on the front lines

Mark Gradoni never expected to be arrested twice while pursuing his Ph.D. 

Gradoni, 36, a history doctoral candidate at UC Irvine, joined UAW 4811 in 2020 — the very first week he started graduate school. He had long been tired of the working conditions for graduate student workers. But it wasn’t until he began pursuing his Ph.D. that he finally had the opportunity to join. 

“I was very excited to be in a labor union … to have a contract with rights and to try and build up our organization and bring in more folks and expand,” Gradoni said.

What he didn’t anticipate, however, was just how deeply involved he would become. By the end of his first year, Gradoni was voted in by his co-workers as one of four head stewards (campus leaders) representing UCI — a role that came with a lot of personal sacrifice. 

Gradoni spent upward of 15 hours a week recruiting new members, coordinating strikes, and helping draft contracts — all on top of his academic duties, which included teaching 12 different history courses as a teacher’s assistant, conducting research and working on his 50-page dissertation paper. 

His work with the union eventually led him from the classroom to the front lines. He has been arrested twice for his activism — first in 2022 and again in 2024.

In December 2022, he joined fellow protesters in blocking access to a UC regents meeting at UCLA’s Luskin Center, part of a coordinated demonstration aimed at pressuring university leaders to address UAW demands for fair wages and better working conditions. The demonstration ended with the police detaining several participants, including Gradoni, for what they cited as an act of civil disobedience.

Just two years later, in May 2024, he was again taken into custody — this time during the dismantling of the pro-Palestine encampment at UC Irvine. Gradoni was among 47 people charged with a misdemeanor count for what police deemed a “failure to disperse at the scene of a riot.”

Rather than deterring him, however, the arrests have only strengthened his resolve. 

“It really affirmed for me that our union and any union groups at large are bigger than any one individual,” Gradoni said. 

Gradoni views this personal sacrifice as part of his responsibility to use the privilege he holds to stand on the front lines.

“If you have an opportunity to stand up and you can do it with a greater degree of safety than a lot of your colleagues do or can, then you have an obligation to,” Gradoni said. “Everyone has an obligation to do what they can.”

Just 15 days following the May arrests, graduate students and teaching assistants at UCI organized a rally demanding amnesty for student protesters and denouncing police actions taken during the takedown of the UCI Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Among those in attendance were public officials, including then-Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan, who spoke in support of protesters like Gradoni, who had been arrested. 

In addition to amnesty for student protesters, the union wants the UC administration to meet graduate student demands through the Researchers Against War campaign. 

Graduate student workers within the UC system, particularly in STEM fields, work in labs funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and private military companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. The UAW is calling for transitional funding so that graduate students’ research does not benefit militarism and war.

Job security and pay 

While pursuing her master’s degree in social work at Long Beach State, Mia Villegas, 25, also works full time as a researcher for UC Irvine’s Department of Psychological Science, studying trauma and early psychosis risk — a job she’s held since summer 2021.

Currently, Villegas serves as a trustee on the executive board of UC Irvine’s UAW 4811 branch, where she helps audit the union’s finances and ensures the union is being fiscally responsible — typically spending 20 hours per week on these duties. In addition to her financial responsibilities, she occasionally travels to represent UCI at statewide and national labor events, like financial officer conferences and political action gatherings. 

By 2022, she was elected as a campus leader and served on the bargaining team during the UC systemwide strike that same year. It wasn’t long before she began to see the tangible impact of her union work — from salary increases to stronger workplace protections — which motivated her to stay actively involved. 

“Since 2021 till now, my salary’s gone up by like $20,000 because of the wins that we’ve made in our contract,” Villegas said. “Not to mention industry-setting protections we have on harassment and bullying. These are all things that are really important to me.” 

With the recent federal pressure on higher education, from budget cuts, layoffs, and restrictions on international students, Villegas feels the stakes are higher than ever. 

“We’re in this crazy academic environment due to the Trump administration’s direct attacks on higher education,” she said. “So this ties into our next two big campaigns: international worker rights and federal funding — making sure that higher education and public research is funded.”

She says it has been difficult balancing her time and roles as a UAW trustee, part-time graduate student, full-time researcher and practicum participant. Her busy schedule often means trading free time for extra hours spent organizing, studying or completing research. 

“All of my classes are night classes, so I take class until 10 p.m. on weekdays and even on weekends,” Villegas said. “That way I can still be on campus to fulfill not only my lab duties, but also meet with workers or leaders I’m helping support.” 

Despite the overwhelming workload, what inspires Villegas to keep going with her work in the UAW is seeing the progress her union has made, and the sense of community and accomplishment that comes with it. 

“I’ve felt myself become more empowered to be a part of the labor movement,” Villegas said. “I’ve seen my co-workers feel that way, too. And I’ve also seen that influence on a state, local, and even federal level through the political organizing we do to support pro-labor candidates who actually listen to workers about what real working-class issues are.”

Yejin Song is studying both journalism and business information management at UC Irvine, and Daniela Castillo is majoring in media studies with a concentration in global and cultural studies at UC Berkeley. They are members of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.

This story originally appeared in EdSource.